There has been a lot of discussion lately in health care about the importance of being mindful. I really haven't paid that much attention to it until today when someone defined mindfulness as "being conscious without thought." What? I had always thought it to mean being attentive, and indeed that's what the dictionary says: "attentive, aware, or careful (usually fol. by of ): mindful of one's responsibilities."

How can you be attentive without thought? What do you think that speaker meant?

someone defined mindfulness as "being conscious without thought."

Doesn't sound like a good definition to me. To be mindful is to be thoughtful, heedful. While looking over the definitions of mindful and mindfulness in the OED2 (online), I notice that it has a special meaning in Buddhism, having to do with meditation of being attentive. I seem to remember in meditation that you are not supposed to be thinking but to be attentive to your breathing or some other phsyical process. Maybe this person has some strange notion of mindfulness that stems from that. Who knows? Did you ask him or her?

I don't think the person was trying to define the meaning of the the word life a dictionary would. They were trying to stress that being careful should be second nature and automatic.

I agree with Z on this. Lots of people stretch the meaning into the metaphysical realm nowadays.

I didn't discuss it with this speaker, and I realize I should have. She did recommend a book that is out on "mindfulness" in medicine, so I'll have to get it. It may have just been her take on it. The word is being more and more used in health and medicine, and I need to understand it. Surely health care providers who are to be "mindful" of their patients must be thoughtful, so I wouldn't understand why she'd give that definition.

Perhaps the book will shed a light.

I would agree that the definition given sounded like the opposite of "mindfulness." Recently, I read a blog which recommended "mindful" breathing as a way of eliminating stress in one's life. It is just as Z describes: you are supposed to pay attention to your breathing and your heartbeat and "breathe with your heart" or something. More like "heartfulness?"

Wordmatic

The book she mentioned was a 2009 book by Kabat-Zinn. I think she might have meant this book or this one, both which have forwards by Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn is a professor emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness inn Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

So, you are right, it has more to do with meditation than being "attentive" to patients, which is how I've seen it used in discussions of patient safety and quality improvement. I just looked on Google and found lots of sites for patient safety and mindfulness (68,000). I am not sure how to link to PowerPoints, but if you click this link ("The End of the Beginning...") and go to the first site, you will see a nice PPT presentation that talks about mindfulness in the way I've thought of it. Slides 18 and 19 are particularly relevant.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,